“There is a direct correlation between the ‘protection of youth,’ specifically their sexuality, and the rise of youth’s desperate search for outlets that escape this regulation.”

Maria-Belen Ordonez

assistant professor in social sciences at OCAD University

Why should images of a brutal rape “so quickly go viral?”

That’s the question Leah Parsons has been asking since her 17-year-old daughter, Rehtaeh, committed suicide months after discovering that a sexually lurid image of her alleged rape was circulating on the Internet.

The instant answer is that we’re in a crappy, greedy, desensitized society where movies, TV and everyday social interaction turn increasingly rancid; where zombies have Hollywood agents, vampires don’t suck and orgies are a click away.

But it’s not the right answer.

The deeper issue — one unsettlingly unexplored — is our lack of understanding about how images function and are understood today; how they work for us, on us, with us and powerfully against us; how they invade and obliterate the very idea of privacy itself.

Yes, these are only pictures — not objects, not knives or guns. And yes, they might to some seem peripheral at best to real incidents involving rape, suicide, intimidation, coercion or, at the very least, teens gone badly wild.

The Parsons case is only the latest example of how the cyber-dissemination of images of horrific behaviour most often results in the greatest pain for the victims.

Yet it’s beginning to feel like a tipping point in our need to find some sense of order and morality within the Internet image blizzard that has until now blurred boundaries between the acceptable and unacceptable, between private and public life.

Students and parents increasingly want surveillance cameras gone from their schools. Diaspora, the personal web server, is an open challenge to Facebook’s privacy policy, only one of many. And this month, Nova Scotia Justice Minister Ross Landry announced plans to request a change to the Criminal Code, to criminalize the dissemination of “intimate” sexual imagery without consent.

A further indication we’re at a tipping point came with CNN’s coverage of the March 17 rape conviction of two teenage football stars in Steubenville, Ohio, whose sexual assault on a 16-year-old girl was filmed and appeared on Instagram and YouTube. In showing particular concern for the ruined reputations of the rapists — “these two young men, with promising futures,” said CNN reporter Poppy Harlow — the American cable giant triggered a firestorm of protest demanding apologies. When jock culture is no longer sacrosanct, change is assuredly at hand.

Possibly this reflects a new awareness about the hurt a malicious image can bring. For some the hurt was unbearable. “I have nobody,” read the cue card held by British Columbia teenager Amanda Todd. Her suicide by hanging in 2012 came after she revealed her bare breasts in a supposedly private video. “I need someone.”

Images can be made to lie, cheat and incriminate where there’s no crime. Knowing a clip of him in bed with another man was circulating through the Twitter-verse, Rutgers student Tyler Clementi jumped to his death from the George Washington Bridge in 2010, but not before he posted a suicide note on Facebook saying, “sorry.”

Images are wielded as weapons. The 18-year-old British trainee chef threatened his 11-year-old rape victim in North London with a knife if she resisted. He also threatened her with his other weapon of choice — pictures he’d taken of the rape he might send to “everyone you love.”

But image-slinging, like gunslinging, can work both ways. Just ask Jon Lovitz. The former Saturday Night Live star turned to his 25,000-strong Twitter following to out three teenagers who painted swastikas and wrote “Jew” in maple syrup at a friend’s home. Lovitz’s cyber-wanted posters led to the girls’ expulsion from school.

Anonymous knows the power of images, which is why the shadowy hacktivist collective prefers to remain undetected. Yet the very shadowy presence of this posse in the Parsons case may have altered police response to the case. Cyber-whistle-blowers have certainly altered the nature of policing.

Still, these are early days. For the most part, uncertainty rules.

Cultural background can determine the reading of images, as do heritage and/or religious belief. Attacks on Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard — now living under police protection — were triggered by conservative Muslims who felt his cartoon depictions of the Prophet Muhammad for the Jyllands-Posten in 2005 were blasphemous.

Age differences shift understanding, too. Teenagers posting images of often graphic personal sexual activity on social media reflect a liberality not shared by older generations. Yet there are studies that indicate the images or information teenagers willing share on the Internet may well be the very material they’re unwilling to show their parents or teachers.

“It is also worth acknowledging a generational disconnection that blames youth for their ‘irresponsible’ access to technology, as if youth should be invested in the same public/private divides of their middle-class elders,” says Maria-Belen Ordonez, an assistant professor in social sciences at OCAD University. “There is a direct correlation between the ‘protection of youth,’ specifically their sexuality, and the rise of youth’s desperate search for outlets that escape this regulation.”

The greatest challenge, however, may be in understanding what privacy now means. We accept a certain amount of surveillance. We cheered the massive cellphone image-harvesting by police in Boston that helped in the investigation of the marathon bombings. And look how public perception of police activity was changed at the G20 summit by citizen “sousveillance.”

We are surrounded by closed-circuit cameras recording images for the police and other public officials. Stores, banks and hotels mount them everywhere. In truth, we’re somewhat seduced by surveillance technology like Google Earth. We’re even making an art of it. Witness Toronto installation artist David Rokeby, winner of a Governor General’s Award in visual and media arts, and his installation pieces, such as Watch (1995) and Guarding Angel (2002) based on surveillance technology.

Surveillance is about image management. The Internet fosters image mismanagement. It takes away control from everyone, subject and uploader — once the item is uploaded, it cannot be reliably expunged and there is no control over who gets access, and what they do with it. Privacy settings on Facebook and other social media are notoriously volatile and difficult to control. Even if the uploader does not identify you, Facebook and other programs that tag photos are likely to identify you and add your name.

Equally volatile is the notion of consent, a very nuanced and complicated consideration. OK, we knew a lot of cellphones were at that private party we attended. Nevertheless we’re really ticked off at seeing video of our little impromptu strip uploaded on the Internet. We didn’t consent to that. Or did we, just by being there? Our friends say we asked for it.

The law — which we often look to for boundary-making — offers little help in making clear distinctions between the private and public as social norms seem more fluid than ever. Privacy legislation does not cover the private use of personal information gleaned in non-business circumstances. The Criminal Code does, however, weigh in with prohibitions on voyeurism, possession and dissemination of sexual images of people under 18, stalking and provincial laws on cyberbullying. Uploading and wrongly tagging someone shown in an embarrassing image can be defamatory.

Technological advancement, a surefire privacy buster, is the game-changer, particularly the onslaught of newly minted tech treats like Vine, Twitter’s video-sharing app, the six-second low-tech image spurt already being used in journalism.

The earliest personal cameras, starting with the boxlike Kodak in 1888, reinforced traditional values, taking pictures of family or formal events. Cellphone cameras thrive on the very opposite, the informal and the instant, the casual and the quirky. But is tech really to blame?

In a sense, cellphones ‘R’ us. Ergonomically designed for intimacy, to curve into the hand or slip over a hip, cellphones are marketed as an extension of the body. A 2002 Sony Ericsson “Catch the Moment” campaign suggests a soccer ball heading to a goal is caught on the goalkeeper’s phone camera screen. “As such it reconfigures the act of catching now in the hands of the spectator, as a mode of viewing,” Heidi Rae Cooley, a University of South Carolina art professor, writes in the Journal of Visual Culture.

“Emerging technologies, particularly those that can manipulate and disseminate images, are not produced outside of the culture that supports their making,” Ordonez observes.

“Public debates continue to be fascinated with youth’s ‘misuse of technology.’ While this does address cyberbullying to a certain degree, it also neglects the complex relationship between the realities of youth’s public culture and technologies they choose to capture their lives.”